According to Sanseido's “Dictionary of the Modern Japanese Language”, a mosaic is a “design or method in which small pieces of stone, glass or marble etc. of various colors are combined and imbedded in a floor or wall.” By using this technique, a number of photographic images can be combined to form a design or a single image (i.e., a mosaic image). The generation of a mosaic image is achieved by splitting the basic design or image into a plurality of tiles and pasting material images that most closely resemble these tile images to the tile areas.
The prior art described above, however, involves a number of problems.
Specifically, there can be instances where, depending upon the image that is the basis of the mosaic, identical material images are pasted to a plurality of the tile areas from among the tile areas obtained by dividing the image. In a region in which these identical material images concentrate within the mosaic image thus generated, these material images produce a certain texture and there is the possibility that this will give rise to a pattern or stripes, etc., not present in the original design or image or not intended. There may even be cases where the generated mosaic image becomes one not in compliance with the user's intentions. In such instances, a process which includes manipulating the basic image and generating the mosaic image again based upon the manipulated image must be executed repeatedly until a mosaic image in line with the user's intentions is generated.
Further, if material images the colors of which closely resemble the colors of the tile areas do not exist when a mosaic image is generated in this manner, the image quality of the mosaic image produced using these material images will decline.